ABSTRACT
The achievement levels of ethnic minority and working-class students in mathematics, together with their under-representation alongside that of female students in post-compulsory mathematics is the focus of extensive research and policy activity. Furthermore, as the previous chapters have shown, even students who choose to study mathematics at undergraduate level are vulnerable in the sense that they frequently express identities of exclusion rather than participation. I have suggested that this may be a product of their particular educational histories and the ways in which they have responded to the ascribed or designated identities carried in repeated discursive positionings. Excluded identities are not merely a question of lack of confidence, persistence or motivation; they are more fundamentally about a disidentification with mathematics in Schoenfeld’s (1994) sense of doing mathematics, as one who can develop legitimate mathematical ideas within a personal epistemology which enables not only creativity—or “key ideas” in Raman’s (2003) sense—but also access to the use of mathematical warrants—that is, agency with regard to mathematical authority. In this chapter, I will look more closely at the issue of how particular mathematical identities develop, and how they serve to exclude certain groups of learners from the possibility of participating in the construction of mathematical knowledge.
